There is a compelling business reason for organizations to invest in the integration of their executive talent. Acquiring a new executive is an expensive proposition for organizations — fees for retained searches are typically in the range of 30% of the executive’s first year’s total compensation. At the same time, the failure rate of external hires in their first two years is high, frequently ranging from 40 to 60%. To create a sustainable organization for the future, not only does a company have to source, recruit and hire people from the outside, but it has to integrate them into the organization successfully to keep them for the long term. A second, equally critical, reason to invest in integration is to accelerate the time it takes for new hires to contribute in a meaningful way to the success of the organization — to help ensure they "hit the ground running."
Our research on the topic drilled down into the process of executive integration to determine what people and organizations can do to facilitate and accelerate the process. This study determined that successful integration into an organization is a complex multifaceted process and involves four distinct components of success.
In 2005, RHR set out to build on that study and collect data that would enable us to create a life stage model of integration that identifies key issues and suggests possible interventions to avoid derailers during the integration process.